openwhatsapp VS recognize-anything-api

My grandmother's primary method of communication is a cheap Android tablet. It unfortunately includes a preinstalled SMS app that upsells a VoIP SMS service. My grandmother gets extremely frustrated by accidently clicking the message icon and opening an upsell page. There's no way to uninstall the VoIP app.

So instead of giving up and buying a new tablet or paying for an unnecessary service, I hacked together a way to open WhatsApp instead.

https://github.com/Kiran-Rao/openwhatsapp

I've not cleaned it up enough to push yet, but I packaged up an open source image recognition model (https://github.com/mnahkies/recognize-anything-api) and then wrote a script to crawl my photo library, run inference over each image and then write the results into the tag tables of digikams sqlite database (https://www.digikam.org/)

One thing I was fairly proud of was how scrappy the script was - I wrote it in typescript for the familiarity with the sqlite driver, but I used find and curl to actually do the crawling and API submission.

Is it hard to do that in pure typescript/node? No, but I was in a "how can I validate if this is even an interesting thing to be doing mode" and execing out to these tools was a way to get there slightly faster.

I've found that this attitude has been a great way to make weekend projects more fun and feel less like work.

Getting to some kind of tangible value sooner has also made easier to not lose interest halfway through and has been yielding me more semi-complete weekend projects (the word semi is doing a lot of work here tbf, but it's all relative)